Léonard Torossian

Victor Picheny, Henry Moss, Léonard Torossian et al.

Bayesian optimisation (BO) is widely used to optimise stochastic black box functions. While most BO approaches focus on optimising conditional expectations, many applications require risk-averse strategies and alternative criteria accounting for the distribution tails need to be considered. In this paper, we propose new variational models for Bayesian quantile and expectile regression that are well-suited for heteroscedastic noise settings. Our models consist of two latent Gaussian processes accounting respectively for the conditional quantile (or expectile) and the scale parameter of an asymmetric likelihood functions. Furthermore, we propose two BO strategies based on max-value entropy search and Thompson sampling, that are tailored to such models and that can accommodate large batches of points. Contrary to existing BO approaches for risk-averse optimisation, our strategies can directly optimise for the quantile and expectile, without requiring replicating observations or assuming a parametric form for the noise. As illustrated in the experimental section, the proposed approach clearly outperforms the state of the art in the heteroscedastic, non-Gaussian case.

Léonard Torossian, Aurélien Garivier, Victor Picheny

We propose and analyze StoROO, an algorithm for risk optimization on stochastic black-box functions derived from StoOO. Motivated by risk-averse decision making fields like agriculture, medicine, biology or finance, we do not focus on the mean payoff but on generic functionals of the return distribution. We provide a generic regret analysis of StoROO and illustrate its applicability with two examples: the optimization of quantiles and CVaR. Inspired by the bandit literature and black-box mean optimizers, StoROO relies on the possibility to construct confidence intervals for the targeted functional based on random-size samples. We detail their construction in the case of quantiles, providing tight bounds based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. We finally present numerical experiments that show a dramatic impact of tight bounds for the optimization of quantiles and CVaR.

Léonard Torossian, Victor Picheny, Robert Faivre et al.

We report on an empirical study of the main strategies for quantile regression in the context of stochastic computer experiments. To ensure adequate diversity, six metamodels are presented, divided into three categories based on order statistics, functional approaches, and those of Bayesian inspiration. The metamodels are tested on several problems characterized by the size of the training set, the input dimension, the signal-to-noise ratio and the value of the probability density function at the targeted quantile. The metamodels studied reveal good contrasts in our set of experiments, enabling several patterns to be extracted. Based on our results, guidelines are proposed to allow users to select the best method for a given problem.